TRACK | Vivian Girls – I Heard You Say

5/5 golden merles

It is mercifully easy to be absorbed in the cascading vocal harmonies of “I Heard You Say.” Its many graceful hooks effectively converge with a sense of punk dread and foreboding. And there is some real force of these coalescing influences.

The instrumentation is quietly elaborate for the garage rock genre, sneaking, rattling and smashing in support. There is much smoldering grit to the production. Everything collapsing through the phases into its right place, nothing extraneous just perfectly balanced.

Between Vivian Girls/The Babies, Cassie Ramone is one of my favorite songwriters. 250 days into this project, it is difficult to believe that I haven’t yet featured either and this is the remedy to that. It’s an oversight.

TRACK | TENTENT – Nieznany Ląd

5/5 golden merles

TENTENT provides dynamic post-punk from Warsaw. The title roughly translates as “Unknown Land.” It’s rallying and transfixing garage rock, patiently coursing in accumulated spirals that venture carefully outward from the sturdy melodic core.

There’s lots of intricate plotting to the instrumentation, tightly performed and locked into the bass exemplar. The track gives us a lesson in how to unfurl a melody that has otherwise fastened around its center. And when the lead breaks later and is freed from this orbit the culmination is deliberate and transcendent material. There’s a great deal of fine pacing and interplay.

The vinyl from Shovel head Records remains available in mint and gold, sent from Poland for about ~$25 with shipping.

TRACK | Dead Ghosts – What To Do

5/5 golden merles

“What To Do” is rapid, direct garage pop/rock. The static-distortion rises up to embrace you from the pyre beneath, fizzing and rasping. It’s finely fermented in its own haze and heartache; a joyous melodic sludge.

The production is a slushy stint of metallic rust, stormy and straightforward, strung together with the copper wire pulled from an abandoned home. Akin to The Riptides or Charlie and the Moonhearts, or any garage within view of the ocean.

Like the recently covered Can’t Get No, the Burger vinyl can be found across the globe with various dings and dents.

TRACK | TELE/VISIONS – Bloody

5/5 golden merles

The introduction and embrace of imperfections in the recording mirrors the chaos in our midst, the ever-present unknown. And this represents cumulatively less kitsch than if it were refined or faithfully and tediously extracted.

This inclusion or allowance of these attributes is a means of conveying that discordance (via distortion, in echo, etc, however reverberating), it approximates these symbolic and the metaphorical misgivings. It is the appropriate representation of factoring in uncertainty into your model, of both your collected perceptions and their conveying through representation in auditory art. And with this admission present upfront —the prospect of erring around the margins, the looming suspicions, the muck and mire— the intention of the work becomes more honest and true, its testaments more convincing.

“Bloody” is a marginally mangled lo-fi clinic on how melody can successfully conspire with tempo under these carefully crafted circumstances. The oscillations swing between movements, flagging and then forceful, hesitant and emboldened. The doubt grounds the professing in a world that resembles our own.

It stands in contrast to corporate refinement. That which has the power and engine to polish style down to bone and yet with all its menacing, perfected honing comes away saying nothing at all. Maybe, largely, because if it had anything of value to add it would promptly undermine the unjust hierarchies that lead to its ascendance?

I don’t know. I like this song, I think it’s fun and has good style. Now people can easily approximate either interpretation in their bedroom — the bile and barrage of the single mic garage or recordings from a pristine sound-proofed void— for now wrapped in the symbols of the past, sand always shifting beneath us. These things won’t mean the same thing to people later. But it is made by people from relatively now and for people from relatively now and in my present subjective opinion it is very good.

TRACK | Nick Normal – Rocket To Russia (Saved My Life)

5/5 golden merles

Dense and quietly devastating garage pop from Portland, Nick Normal’s “Rocket To Russia (Saved My Life)” opens with a David Lynch cameo and proceeds to bludgeon you with an inventive dredging of the interpersonal.

Lie to yourself / But please don’t ever lie to me

There’s a lot of rich, orthogonal storytelling put to work compiling an era, moving with assurance through the sequential reminiscences. Parsing the pastiche, it covers more ground than seems intuitively possible. The zonal telling is clobbered by some masterfully metered lo-fi tones.

TRACK | Guided by Voices – You’re Not an Airplane

5/5 golden merles

Dayton rockers GBV even further stripped down here, just Pollard and piano on this lovely quasi-lament. The pathos is insurmountable, coming in waves from the fluctuations of the tape deck, and early and then late in the noise, some squeaking that might be crickets or a rotary winding.

It’s very effective. At 33 seconds in length, a formidable track to cap off the album. It feels like an ode to the rust belt (At this point, maybe not then / maybe even then), and there is an immense hollowness to the claim that “the race is yet to come.” It hurts. But also there’s some hope in it; not in the short or the medium term, but maybe metaphorically, or at least that time is long and ours is not the only telling.

TRACK | Peluquería Canina – Hilda Zaude

5/5 golden merles

“Hilda Zaude” is solid psych-punk rock from Madrid, Spain. It’s contains overlapping guitar phrasing echoing and bounding in a kind of pop-sludge anthem.

The lyrics translated from the Basque speak of death and mourning. It surrounds you / chills your whole body / you are dead / I don’t understand anything.

This is complimented by the menacing, at times reverb-shrieking lead guitar tones, ominous bass, and purposefully dreary scale. The chorus is direct, composed of a solitary scream of “¡ahhh!”

It’s a foreboding track that also has an element of the festive or ceremonial to it, a good mix of garage and ghastly.

TRACK | Dead Ghosts – Summer with Phil

5/5 golden merles

One of my favorite garage-surf records, Can’t Get No has a wealth of hooks and much nuanced noise in the murkiest depths of it’s of lo-fi production.

What stands out most is the labor involved in honing these complimentary tones and the stunning results from this joy of invention.

“Summer with Phil” is quietly ornate, teasing out melodies, amorphously coagulating and decaying. The passages are faithfully and formatively statured throughout, with consistency rising from the formidable 2010 s/t.

I have not spent enough time with 2020’s Automatic Changer, but will rectify this in the near-term. Can’t Get No has a few colored vinyl on the second hand market.

TRACK | Times New Viking – Half Day In Hell

5/5 golden merles

With the proper balance of muck and bile, “Half Day In Hell” conspires to deliver noise pop rock with great wrath and fission. In this base of static hum, no melody is sacrificed to the texture but heightened by it.

Not exactly discordant, it is raised to extremes of saturation with very modest deterioration to melodic intent. Elliott and Murphy trade vocals in the haze, refining the wavelengths. It’s the best produced thing I have listened to (revisited) in ages.

After the last week of inconsequential societal response into a myriad horrors, lines like “we will stay forever for a week,” we have done all that we can do,” “and don’t agree on what to do just to kill time,” and “we couldn’t come together even if we tried,” land a little bit differently, arbitrarily recontextualized to the present in the constant mire of all that is. But these statements remain vaguely stated enough to interpretively address any given scope of social incongruity.

It is modestly miraculous, full of fine trepidation, not reliant on habits and precedent but reaching in its forms to match the emotion and intention. It feels refined but natural and that is a bit freeing. Often when this path is followed it leads into greater abstraction that discounts melody and a greater loss of coherence. Which is fine, but needn’t be the case. Finding that balance is powerful and admirable.

TRACK | Son Bou – Hundí Mis Labios En Los Suyos

5/5 golden merles

Son Bou’s 2013 self-titled EP is blazing indie punk from Barcelona, built of or on a small fire. In either case, they’re tuning to the flame. It holds the finest lo-fi hymnals and tempo shifts, the melodies keenly cut reliably across the set.

The lyrics for the selected track translated bluntly into English are about love, its cultural expectations and preferred collaborators. The arrangement is divinely shifting, hammering together a few fine forms that turn seamlessly along the axis. The velocity changes keep fresh and the variance between verses and are appended by a bridge of textural vocalizations. It is an excellent repeater.

The EP can be ordered from Barcelona for €6 or more + shipping from Hao!Discos. Alternatively Discogs has the 7″ for some very reasonable fees on a few that have made it to the US. Otherwise an absurdly reasonable Euro for the digital issue.